Excerpts of Recent Panels

SCMLA, San Antonio, TX, November 9-11, 2000

Special Session:   "Teaching Eudora Welty in Cultural Contexts"

Chair, Ruth D. Weston, The Eudora Welty Society

1.  "Geography and Autobiography: Teaching Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings"
Timothy Dow Adams, West Virginia University

Professor Adams focuses on several of Eudora Welty's cultural contexts that involve geography, as he follows Welty's autobiographical explanation of how her life experiences taught her to be a writer. Adams argues that in One Writer's Beginnings Welty's theme of vision, along with the related aural sense, is directly related to the differences and confluences between the topographies of her childhood home in Mississippi, her mother's home in the mountains of West Virginia, and her father's home in Ohio. He notes the tension between linear and spiral images in her descriptions of her family's travels.  He contrasts the book's movements, from eye to ear to voice, as these reflect the new ways in which Welty learned to apprehend her world and to wait for just the right narrative moment in her fiction to make her characters "visible."

2.  "Welty and the 1930s"
Barbara G. Ladd, Emory University

 Professor Ladd examines Welty's writing in terms of the social and political activities of the 1930s. Concentrating on Welty's early fiction, Ladd addresses the relationship between Welty's aesthetics and the documentary aesthetics of the 1930s. Noting that the fiction's focus on interiority has prevented Welty's being compared with social protest writers such as James Agee and John Steinbeck, Ladd demonstrates that some of Welty's early fiction does indeed reveal social engagement, especially in "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "The Whistle." Ladd also points up the difference between Welty's subtle fictional "exposand the more personally intrusive exposures that resulted from the photography of, for example, Agee and Walker Evans.

3.  "'Nothing Happens': Welty, Hurston, Race, and Point of View"
Sarah Ford, Baylor University

Professor Ford responds to two difficulties she has encountered in teaching Delta Wedding: students' complaint that "nothing happens" and their uneasiness with what they perceive as the author's superficial treatment of black characters. To begin with, Ford has found that, by teaching Delta Wedding in conjunction with Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, she is able to show that both writers are conscious of racial politics. Although both have been accused of lacking racial sensitivity (Hurston for her heavy use of dialect), Ford argues that they reveal their cultural engagement subtly through their characters' points of view. Moreover, by tracing point of view instead of plot in the novel, Ford's students learn a new meaning for the concept of "what happens" in fiction, and thus become more sophisticated readers.